Check Out Shepard Fairey's Collaboration with OFF!

And listen to a track from the record here

On this year's Record Store Day (or April 19 to those of you who aren't vinyl hoarders), Vice Records is releasing an interesting cross-disciplinary collaboration between artist Shepard Fairey (he of the Obama "Hope" poster) and the punk band OFF!. The seven-inch single features two songs by OFF!, a punk supergroup featuring former Circle Jerks and Black Flag vocalist Keith Morris fronting a group of veterans from bands like Redd Kross, Burning Brides, and Rocket from the Crypt, with cover art by Fairey based on the music. The combination of OFF!'s relentless hardcore energy (which you can hear more of on their recent LP Wasted Years) and Fairey's riff on classic SoCal punk record sleeves makes it one of the must-have releases of this year's Record Store Day. I got Fairey on the phone to learn more about the team-up. Read our conversation below and listen to "Learn to Obey" exclusively here.

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MILES RAYMER: Tell me how this collaboration came together.

SHEPARD FAIREY: Well it's funny, it's kind of a long time in the making, in a sense. I think the third record I bought with my own money was the Circle Jerks' Golden Shower of Hits. It was 1984, I was 14 years old. Also around the same time I started getting into the Black Flag stuff that Keith Morris sang on, and the first punk show I ever saw — I grew up in South Carolina so not much ever came through there — was when the Circle Jerks came through in '86 at a high school gymnasium that had been rented out to the local promoter. Then I was also a fan of the Burning Brides. The first stickers I ever made for a band that wasn't local was for Redd Kross. Then you've got Mario, who comes from skateboarding and was in the Black Heart Procession down in San Diego while I was living there. So I have some weird connection to pretty much everyone in the band. Keith and [OFF! guitarist] Dimitri [Coats] came over to my studio and saw all the artworks I've done that were a tribute to the LP format, you know, the square format, and they liked a lot of them and they said it would be really cool if we could do a project where you create a piece of art and we write a song around it. But what ended up happening is that they wrote "Learn to Obey" before I had a chance to do the art, so I ended up checking out the song and making the art around it. It's such a weird circle of inspiration, and totally awesome for me.

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MR: I notice that you stuck to black and white for the design. Was that you trying to work with the aesthetic that Raymond Pettibon developed for them?

SF: Absolutely. I'm a huge Pettibon fan and I think that the visual identity systems that he created for Black Flag and OFF! are extraordinary. I think if you look at the illustration, there's a nod to all that but it still looks like my illustration style. I tried to find what I thought was a really good convergence of all those things. I'm doing a poster of it that has just a hint of red in the star-diamond insignia on the scout's hat, so there's a hint of that, and I'm doing some street art with the image, too. I think it's cool as a tie-in, but I also like it as a standalone. That's the cool thing about a project like this.

MR: I know music's been a big influence on your visual art. Do you feel any different when you're on the job, designing a record cover for a band that you like?

SF: If I'm hired by, say, Led Zeppelin or whoever — you know, one of those whatever bands like Led Zeppelin [laughs] — of course they're the client. They come to me for me, but they have the final say. When I'm designing something for myself that's a tribute to say the Melvins or the Ramones, it's fun because of course I want to put them on a pedestal but I get to do it exactly how I want to. But a lot of the things I've been able to do, whether it was for Tom Petty or Interpol or Bad Brains or Led Zeppelin, have ended up feeling really similar even though they're the client. But for art and commerce to come together in a way that's even remotely symbiotic is so unusual that I'm grateful to get close to ideal if not absolute ideal. And I know that's contrary to the way most artists are, which is to complain about everything and hate everything. I don't know, I guess I'm just more gracious than most artists are. I appreciate the fact that I get to draw pictures for a living.